Many people trade their cars in very frequently, on the order of two or three years. Thats why you see these notes with $10k ballon payments at the end. They estimate the value of the car after two years, and they buyer just sells it back at the end of the two years and gets a new car.
This way they always have a shiney, new, reliable car.
I'm pretty sure that if car commercials were ineffective at selling cars you'd see car lots advertising some other way.
Several people in my extended family have worked or are currently working as car salespeople, both new and used, and they tell me that I would be surprised at how many impulse buys they get.
DS9 was my favorite series I think, at least the later seasons. It was a little weak for a while until the figured out how to make it work.
I'd still love to see a Trek series focused on telling stories in the Trek universe instead of focusing on one crew. Take as many episodes and actors as it takes to tell the story properly, and when its done, get a new cast and a new story and do it all again. No reaching for new stories when things get worn out, but as much time as you need to develop characters. And if the fans want to see continuations or some story is good enough to spin off a new series, you can.
Re:Baxters writing is painful
on
Coalescent
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· Score: 1
Apostrophes are overrated.
I see two missing in the last paragraph, are there more?
Re:Banks or Reynolds - Re:Baxters writing is painf
on
Coalescent
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· Score: 1
I have not read Banks, but I have several of Reynolds books and have enjoyed reading them very much. Good enough that when I browse the shelves his is one of the few specific names I watch for.
Baxters writing is painful
on
Coalescent
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Heres a review I did of Ring, the only Baxter book I've read. Keep in mind I'm no writer myself, this is just my opinion, not a professional review.
As far as the ideas of grand scifi go, Ring ranks near the top. The story spans 5 million years, two universes and includes one character, Lieserl, a once-human AI whose life spans nearly all 5 millon years. Lieserl is one of the two most interesting characters in the book, the other is a 1000 year old man named Uvarov. Unfortunately, both characters exist only to serve a couple of key plot points. All of the characters are flat and uninteresting, with no decernable personality or drive.
The major elements are interesting, everything between is grating. Particularly the characters propensity to speak the name of the person they are addressing every second time they open their mouths. By the end of the book you will be subconciously filtering out the names, or just skipping the dialog outright. For the most part, you won't miss it.
Every problem is solved almost magically, the characters never break a sweat. Mostly they stand around addressing each other by name and explaining to each other (purely for the readers benefit) the technology and history of the story. The plot is very obviously there only as a tool for the author to speculate about some of the very cool things that an incredibly advance race might do with the universe.
If this book were a blanket, it would be a net of irritating wool holding together some very finely cut jewels. Thats why I'm giving it three stars. Its irritating to use, but still worth having around. If you want silk sheets, try Vernor Vinge instead.
They probably don't make you want to go buy a new Model X car, but they do keep reminding you how nice a shiny new car would be, which helps to keep people buying cars.
How often would you think about buying a new car if you never saw a car commercial?
Your cable or dish bill does not pay for basic channels, it pays for the service of having them piped into your home over a cable or sat.
I'd love to be able to pay only for the 4 channels I care to watch so I could see them commercial free.
Or for that matter, I'd like to be able to pay for each show that I watch and get it commercial free and in DVD quality (many old reruns are so highly compressed that the MPEG or whatever compression artifacting is very distracting).
What scares me about Freenet (which I run, but don't use much because its so damned slow) is that if it were highly secure, fast and searchable, and it replaced the file sharing apps we have now, I expect that TPTB would start attacking our legal right to run such an application on the grounds that unrestricted and anonymous information exchange is too dangerous to allow to exist in such an accessable form.
IMHO it is natural for society and economy to change as technology advances, but people who have found ways to make lots of money in a particular way generally don't want things to change that make that method ineffective, and will do what is necessary to protect themselves without regard to the long-term health of society.
IMO it is more important to move to a candidate ranking system than to have electronic voting.
Third parties in the US are pretty much screwed because people know about the 'vote stealing' effect. If people that would normally vote for party one vote for party three, party two ends up with the majority of votes, even if party one would have gotten the majority if party three had not been running.
Its dumb, and I think its a problem that electronic voting could help to solve (ranking candidates on a screen that can dynamicly reorder the names to show preferences could be much easier for stupid people to use than anything on paper)
There's a VERY easy solution--Go to file>>database>>Properties. Then go to the "rocket ship" tab (sorry, but most people who have these troubles need pictures). Then choose "Restore as last viewed by user" under the "When opened in Notes client" option.
Ok, I did that, shut down, and restarted, and it had put the setting back to the default. So I did it again about three times, and now the setting sticks, but it always opens to that same front page anyway.
Lotus might be acutally be cool, but all I want is an email client.
I use NotesBuddy from IBM most of the time, its still crappy, but its much better for email and Sametime Connect IM's than the standard clients.
I'm all for more efficent spending of my tax dollars, but I don't think its possible right now to run this country without a federal government supported by tax money.
I'd love to see more resources put into studying how computers can be used to make government more efficent, followed immediately by putting the findings into practice. Every time I deal with any government agency I feel like I've stepped back in time about 50 years. Seems like the IRS is the only agency that likes making it easy for me to deal with, and thats only because I have to send them money.
Hmm, just like NIMBY, Don't Cut My Budget, cut someone elses.
If I were president, I'd just cut everybody, 2% across the board, then dump that stupid social security program. You want retirement benefits, save some fricken money while you can still work or have kids. I hear McDonalds is hiring.
Additionally, to reply to a different post, its not dumb either, the failure modes of most of this stuff is better than most of the best of commercial software.
You know those stain resistant pants they are always advertising on TV? That is a nanotechnology material. No, they don't self assemble, they don't really do anything but repel liquids really, really well. But it wasn't possible without nanotechology and its on the market now. And more stuff will be appearing all the time.
The homeless have effectively dropped off of the map of society and aren't even getting exploited anymore
The homeless now are typically people with severe mental or addiction issues that really aren't exploitable for much. There are occasional single parents down on their luck, but they can generally find help without much trouble.
Seriously though, I think that any modern society with a large middle class will have fewer starving, simply because there is so much crap that the middle class casts of that is still quite useable.
If the standard of living of the middle class goes up far enough, the very bottom class could end up living almost as well as what the middle class used to. Presuming of course a society like we have today, that always wants new stuff. If our technology starts producing stuff that never breaks or repairs itself very cheaply, and we stop discarding stuff as much it would change the dynamic.
Well, in software, when you simply can't get the processor to run your code any faster, you switch to trying to using the speed you've got more efficently.
Perhaps if Intel can't make chips very much smaller or faster, they can concentrate on getting more performance in other, more clever ways. Improve the instruction sets and data handling, branch prediction, parallelization, and hundreds of other parameters that only chip designers know about.
This is a great system for anyone with lots of money. It doesn't matter if someone else has already patented something, you just file your own patent, then use it as legal justification against people who won't have the cash to mount a proper defense. Maybe it wouldn't stand up to a full attack because of previous filings, but that doesn't matter if you are careful.
I expect that the built-in recognition of faces by a baby, and its subsequent happy reactions (stairing, grins, and happy-noises) also aid in keeping babies alive because its care-givers find the recognition pleasing.
And if you have ever spent the night up with an unhappy baby, you know exactly what I'm talking about.
It was a poor joke, using a judge as an embodiment of law.
Unfortunately the best reply to my post was by an AC, so there isn't any point in replying to him.
One of his points was that rule of law works by concensus not by force. I agree, to an extent. But I think that on a personal level most people follow the law either because they feel that it is 'just wrong' to break it (training, an equavalency of law and ethics), or because bad things will happen to them personally as a direct result (fines, jail time). Not because they think that it is important for them to follow the law in order that society will remain ordered.
Slashdot Mirror
Many people trade their cars in very frequently, on the order of two or three years. Thats why you see these notes with $10k ballon payments at the end. They estimate the value of the car after two years, and they buyer just sells it back at the end of the two years and gets a new car.
This way they always have a shiney, new, reliable car.
I'm pretty sure that if car commercials were ineffective at selling cars you'd see car lots advertising some other way.
Several people in my extended family have worked or are currently working as car salespeople, both new and used, and they tell me that I would be surprised at how many impulse buys they get.
DS9 was my favorite series I think, at least the later seasons. It was a little weak for a while until the figured out how to make it work.
I'd still love to see a Trek series focused on telling stories in the Trek universe instead of focusing on one crew. Take as many episodes and actors as it takes to tell the story properly, and when its done, get a new cast and a new story and do it all again. No reaching for new stories when things get worn out, but as much time as you need to develop characters. And if the fans want to see continuations or some story is good enough to spin off a new series, you can.
Apostrophes are overrated.
I see two missing in the last paragraph, are there more?
I have not read Banks, but I have several of Reynolds books and have enjoyed reading them very much. Good enough that when I browse the shelves his is one of the few specific names I watch for.
Heres a review I did of Ring, the only Baxter book I've read. Keep in mind I'm no writer myself, this is just my opinion, not a professional review.
As far as the ideas of grand scifi go, Ring ranks near the top. The story spans 5 million years, two universes and includes one character, Lieserl, a once-human AI whose life spans nearly all 5 millon years. Lieserl is one of the two most interesting characters in the book, the other is a 1000 year old man named Uvarov. Unfortunately, both characters exist only to serve a couple of key plot points. All of the characters are flat and uninteresting, with no decernable personality or drive.
The major elements are interesting, everything between is grating. Particularly the characters propensity to speak the name of the person they are addressing every second time they open their mouths. By the end of the book you will be subconciously filtering out the names, or just skipping the dialog outright. For the most part, you won't miss it.
Every problem is solved almost magically, the characters never break a sweat. Mostly they stand around addressing each other by name and explaining to each other (purely for the readers benefit) the technology and history of the story. The plot is very obviously there only as a tool for the author to speculate about some of the very cool things that an incredibly advance race might do with the universe.
If this book were a blanket, it would be a net of irritating wool holding together some very finely cut jewels. Thats why I'm giving it three stars. Its irritating to use, but still worth having around. If you want silk sheets, try Vernor Vinge instead.
[...]who married Nom from ST DS9[...] ... Must ... Resist ...
Gah!
Can't do it; its 'Rom' you nincompoop!
They probably don't make you want to go buy a new Model X car, but they do keep reminding you how nice a shiny new car would be, which helps to keep people buying cars.
How often would you think about buying a new car if you never saw a car commercial?
Your cable or dish bill does not pay for basic channels, it pays for the service of having them piped into your home over a cable or sat.
I'd love to be able to pay only for the 4 channels I care to watch so I could see them commercial free.
Or for that matter, I'd like to be able to pay for each show that I watch and get it commercial free and in DVD quality (many old reruns are so highly compressed that the MPEG or whatever compression artifacting is very distracting).
What scares me about Freenet (which I run, but don't use much because its so damned slow) is that if it were highly secure, fast and searchable, and it replaced the file sharing apps we have now, I expect that TPTB would start attacking our legal right to run such an application on the grounds that unrestricted and anonymous information exchange is too dangerous to allow to exist in such an accessable form.
IMHO it is natural for society and economy to change as technology advances, but people who have found ways to make lots of money in a particular way generally don't want things to change that make that method ineffective, and will do what is necessary to protect themselves without regard to the long-term health of society.
So, what happens if you dump EtBr on your fingers?
IMO it is more important to move to a candidate ranking system than to have electronic voting.
Third parties in the US are pretty much screwed because people know about the 'vote stealing' effect. If people that would normally vote for party one vote for party three, party two ends up with the majority of votes, even if party one would have gotten the majority if party three had not been running.
Its dumb, and I think its a problem that electronic voting could help to solve (ranking candidates on a screen that can dynamicly reorder the names to show preferences could be much easier for stupid people to use than anything on paper)
[notes] almost NEVER works the way I expect and *want* it to
If you feel this way, you obviously don't get the point of the user interface design in Notes...
Nobody really knows what the point is, but surely we are missing it.
There's a VERY easy solution--Go to file>>database>>Properties. Then go to the "rocket ship" tab (sorry, but most people who have these troubles need pictures). Then choose "Restore as last viewed by user" under the "When opened in Notes client" option.
Ok, I did that, shut down, and restarted, and it had put the setting back to the default. So I did it again about three times, and now the setting sticks, but it always opens to that same front page anyway.
Lotus might be acutally be cool, but all I want is an email client.
I use NotesBuddy from IBM most of the time, its still crappy, but its much better for email and Sametime Connect IM's than the standard clients.
How do you run a government without taxes?
I'm all for more efficent spending of my tax dollars, but I don't think its possible right now to run this country without a federal government supported by tax money.
I'd love to see more resources put into studying how computers can be used to make government more efficent, followed immediately by putting the findings into practice. Every time I deal with any government agency I feel like I've stepped back in time about 50 years. Seems like the IRS is the only agency that likes making it easy for me to deal with, and thats only because I have to send them money.
Hmm, just like NIMBY, Don't Cut My Budget, cut someone elses.
If I were president, I'd just cut everybody, 2% across the board, then dump that stupid social security program. You want retirement benefits, save some fricken money while you can still work or have kids. I hear McDonalds is hiring.
Additionally, to reply to a different post, its not dumb either, the failure modes of most of this stuff is better than most of the best of commercial software.
You know those stain resistant pants they are always advertising on TV? That is a nanotechnology material. No, they don't self assemble, they don't really do anything but repel liquids really, really well. But it wasn't possible without nanotechology and its on the market now. And more stuff will be appearing all the time.
The homeless have effectively dropped off of the map of society and aren't even getting exploited anymore
The homeless now are typically people with severe mental or addiction issues that really aren't exploitable for much. There are occasional single parents down on their luck, but they can generally find help without much trouble.
Most of us Americans are pear-shaped I think...
Seriously though, I think that any modern society with a large middle class will have fewer starving, simply because there is so much crap that the middle class casts of that is still quite useable.
If the standard of living of the middle class goes up far enough, the very bottom class could end up living almost as well as what the middle class used to. Presuming of course a society like we have today, that always wants new stuff. If our technology starts producing stuff that never breaks or repairs itself very cheaply, and we stop discarding stuff as much it would change the dynamic.
Well, in software, when you simply can't get the processor to run your code any faster, you switch to trying to using the speed you've got more efficently.
Perhaps if Intel can't make chips very much smaller or faster, they can concentrate on getting more performance in other, more clever ways. Improve the instruction sets and data handling, branch prediction, parallelization, and hundreds of other parameters that only chip designers know about.
This is a great system for anyone with lots of money. It doesn't matter if someone else has already patented something, you just file your own patent, then use it as legal justification against people who won't have the cash to mount a proper defense. Maybe it wouldn't stand up to a full attack because of previous filings, but that doesn't matter if you are careful.
um. yeah. Like, thats why it was funny. Perhaps the bold tags on the quoted text didn't make it obvious enough that I was pointing out the errors?
Great links, thanks for the info.
I expect that the built-in recognition of faces by a baby, and its subsequent happy reactions (stairing, grins, and happy-noises) also aid in keeping babies alive because its care-givers find the recognition pleasing.
And if you have ever spent the night up with an unhappy baby, you know exactly what I'm talking about.
how does this analogy work
It was a poor joke, using a judge as an embodiment of law.
Unfortunately the best reply to my post was by an AC, so there isn't any point in replying to him.
One of his points was that rule of law works by concensus not by force. I agree, to an extent. But I think that on a personal level most people follow the law either because they feel that it is 'just wrong' to break it (training, an equavalency of law and ethics), or because bad things will happen to them personally as a direct result (fines, jail time). Not because they think that it is important for them to follow the law in order that society will remain ordered.